viernes, 6 de julio de 2018

The Millennial Socialists Are Coming

By Michelle Goldberg

CreditIllustration
by Selman Design; Photographs by Tammy Bradshaw, Seth Wenig/Associated
Press, Mark Makela for The New York Times, and Jeff Swensen for The New
York Times.

In May, three young progressive women running for
the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic
Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily
favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee,
30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom
Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family.

Elizabeth
Fiedler, 37, announced her run three months after giving birth to her
second child, and she had a nursery in her Philadelphia campaign office
so other parents could drop off their kids before canvassing shifts.
Talking to voters, she spoke of depending on Medicaid and CHIP for her
kids’ health insurance, and of the anxiety she felt during two weeks
when their insurance lapsed.

Lee was open about the more than
$200,000 in student loans that have weighed on her since graduating from
law school, which gave her a visceral sense, she told me, of the “need
for free, quality education for everybody.” (An African-American woman
running in a largely white district, she ended up with 68 percent of the
vote.) Innamorato spoke about how her father’s opioid addiction had
pushed her and her mother from the middle class. “I’ve lived the
struggles of my district,” she told me.ImageElizabeth Fiedler, a first-time candidate who won a primary for state representative in Pennsylvania.CreditTammy Bradshaw

Sara
Innamorato, a Democratic Socialist, won the Democratic Party’s
nomination for state representative in her district in
Pittsburgh.CreditJeff Swensen for The New York Times

Their
races were part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across
this country, something that is, for me, the sole source of optimism in
this very dark time. Marinating in the news in New York City, I’m often
sick with despair. An authoritarian president of dubious legitimacy and
depraved character is poised to remake America for generations with a
second Supreme Court pick. The federal government is a festival of
kleptocratic impunity. Kids the same age as my own are ripped from their
migrant parents.ImageSummer
Lee defeated a longtime incumbent in a primary for a State Senate seat
in Pennsylvania.CreditMark Makela for The New York Times

But
all over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near
supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding
ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged
suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that
often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see
Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and
economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle
for democratic socialism.

Today, the victories of Lee,
Innamorato and Fielder look like a portent. On Tuesday, a similar
pattern played out on a grander scale in New York City, when Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old democratic socialist, shook the Democratic
Party by toppling Joseph Crowley, a 19-year incumbent, chairman of the
Queens County Democratic Party and potential heir to House minority
leader Nancy Pelosi. Weeks before the election, Crowley’s own polling
showed him up by 36 percentage points. Ocasio-Cortez ended up winning by 15.ImageAlexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old political newcomer who upset United
States Representative Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary in New
York.CreditSeth Wenig/Associated Press

She did it the same
way as the women in Pennsylvania — by mobilizing scores of volunteers
and connecting with voters one-on-one. “There were folks on the ground
there for months without any national attention, talking to people at
the subway stops,” said Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for New York
attorney general who endorsed Ocasio-Cortez in May.

Given the
overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of her district, Ocasio-Cortez will
almost certainly win the general election. Neither Lee, Fiedler nor
Innamorato is facing a serious Republican challenger, so they are set to
become legislators as well.

On Twitter, Trump has fantasized
about a red wave that will sweep even more Republicans into power in
November and reinforce his rule. But the real red wave may be democratic
socialism’s growing political influence, especially among young people.
“She really showed that you can run on these issues and win,” Maria
Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, said
about Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which includes Medicare for All,
abolishing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency,
and a federal jobs guarantee.

The D.S.A., to which Ocasio-Cortez
belongs, is the largest socialist organization in America. Its growth
has exploded since the 2016 election — when, of course, avowed
democratic socialist Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary — from
7,000 members to more than 37,000. It’s an activist group rather than a
political party, working with Democrats in the electoral realm while
also agitating against injustice from the outside.

Many of the
D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are
indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A.
is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious
about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions
“a humane social order based on popular control of resources and
production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial
equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Talk
of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older
Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the
young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18
and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great
Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health
insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young
people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the
widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all
around them.

The D.S.A. alone neither claims nor deserves sole
credit for the victories of candidates it endorses. Many groups came
together behind Ocasio-Cortez, including the populist Brand New Congress
and local chapters of the resistance group Indivisible. Nor was the
D.S.A. the prime mover behind the Fiedler, Lee and Innamorato wins,
though it helped in all of them.

Indeed, while there’s a lot of
talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats, on the ground,
boundaries seem more fluid. In Pennsylvania recently, I met with
moderate suburban resistance activists who’d volunteered for Innamorato,
thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the
Democratic Party.

Barry Rush is a 63-year-old retiree who used to
vote for both Democrats and Republicans, but who, horrified by Trump,
now devotes himself full time to a liberal group called Progress PA. His
main concern is electing Democrats — “I’m gonna pull the Smurf lever
till this gets fixed,” he says of voting blue — and he knows that the
Democratic Party needs young people. He was heartened by all the
millennials at Innamorato’s victory celebration: “There were 500 kids
there!” he said. It gave him hope for his grandkids.

The young
members of the D.S.A., meanwhile, are hopeful because their analysis
helps them make sense of the Trump catastrophe. They often seem less
panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are,
because they believe they know why our society is coming undone, and
how it can be rebuilt.

“The Trump disaster is that everyone feels
threatened individually, and feels like they have to fight Trump and
fight this administration,” Arielle Cohen, the Pittsburgh D.S.A.’s
29-year-old co-chair, told me as I sat with her and two other chapter
leaders in a small coffee shop in the city’s East End. “And socialists
are saying, this has actually been going on for a long time. It’s not
just Trump. It’s not just who’s in office.”

There is a strange
sort of comfort in this perspective; the socialists see themselves as
building the world they want to live in decades in the future rather
than just scrambling to avert catastrophe in the present.

Talking
to Cohen and others from the D.S.A.’s Pittsburgh chapter, which has
more than 620 members, I was struck by the work they put into building
community. On some days that public schools are closed, the D.S.A.’s
socialist-feminist committee puts on all-day events with child care and
free lunches. Like several other chapters, the Pittsburgh D.S.A. holds
clinics where members change people’s burned-out car brake lights for
free, helping them avoid unnecessary police run-ins while making inroads
into the community. A local mechanic named Metal Mary helped train
them.

Democratic socialist chapters have constant streams of
meetings and social events, creating an antidote to the isolation that’s
epidemic in American life. “Everything is highly individualized, and it
is isolating,” Svart said. “People are very, very lonely. Suicide rates
have gone up astronomically. And we do create a community for folks.”
This fusion of politics and communal life isn’t so different from what
the Christian right has offered its adherents. Such social capital is
something no amount of campaign spending can buy.

After Ocasio-Cortez’s win, Pelosi denied Republican claims that socialism is ascendant in the Democratic Party.
It’s hard to blame her for being defensive, since for generations
“socialist” was considered a slur, and it’s one that’s hurled at
Democrats indiscriminately. But I think she’s wrong. There are more
candidates like Ocasio-Cortez out there, and the Democrats should
welcome them. It needs their youth and zeal and willingness to do the
work of rebuilding the party as a neighborhood institution. And they’re
coming, whether the party’s leadership likes it or not.

In
Pennsylvania, unlike many other states, being a state legislator is a
full-time job. When I met Lee a month after her victory, she was
thinking about all she needed to learn once she gets to Harrisburg, the
capital. But she was also confident that she and others like her are
ready to remake the Democratic Party.

“If what we did here in
Pennsylvania shows anything, it’s that we can do that,” she said. “We
can go up against the establishment. We can support our own candidacies.
We can run positive campaigns. We can do all that, and we can actually
win. And then we can do it again, and we can do it everywhere.”